Red faces in Pakistan

Salman Rushdie’s Facebook page is an interesting place today. He noticed right off the bat that the location of bin Laden’s vacation home raises some tricky questions. So did William Dalrymple. 13 hours ago – which was 9 last night Pacific Time, so before Obama made the announcement.

Dalrymple: In Abbotabad next to the Pakistan’s main military academy. Funny that.

Rushdie: That’s right. Army town. Just the place for the world’s most wanted man to live unobserved.

Quite. I’ve been trying to picture it. Giant compound, 8 times the size of anything else in the neighborhood; 12 to 18 foot walls; mystery occupants; important military academy a few hundred meters away; retired military people all around. Nobody notices; nobody worries; nobody asks questions; nobody investigates.

Damn right it’s “embarrassing.” Osama purpose-builds a high-security luxury compound in a Pak military cantonment, 800 yards from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, and for YEARS runs al-Qaeda from it, his couriers coming and going… and we’re supposed to believe Pakistan wasn’t protecting him? (Mullah Omar, it’s widely rumoured, is in another ISI safe house.)

16 Responses to “Red faces in Pakistan”

Robert Fisk was on the CBC this morning, saying similar things. His theory was that OBL had outlived his usefulness to the Pakistanis and was now a liability, so they arranged to let the Americans know where to find him. Dunno if I can get that conspiratorial.

This raises enormous questions about the role of Pakistan as a staging area for terrorism. The ISI presumably supports such action. Hopefully, this will force the Pakistani government to rein in the ISI. If it does not, Pakistan’s credibility in the world will suffer irreparably. It is already seen to be one of the most militantly Islamic states — other than Saudi Arabia — and it seems clear that the fact that Osama was living unhindered in Pakistan, in a cantonment city, must bring matters to a head. Supposing, though, that Pakistan colaborated in this because Osama had outlived his usefulness seems a bit of a stretch, since it could not fail to be a deep embarrassment to Pakistan. If they really thought him no longer useful, they should have taken him out themselves, to save them from this very embarrassment. Collaborating with the Americans, after constantly complaining about cross border raids and drone attacks, would be inconsistent with their policy to date. At least President Obama has lived up to one of his big promises. This should help his reelection campaign next year.

Possibly, though I think the kind of embarrassment it will suffer from finding Osama living so publicly may give the government itself some purchase. India is still a potent threat to Pakistan. Evidence of such obvious bias in favour of Islamists will not ease relationships with the giant to Pakistan’s south.

Despite the Pakistani claims, there is every reason for India to maintain control of Kashmir, since there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. The suggestion that India should give up a Muslim majority area of the country is quite simply the posturing of theocrats, and has very little political justification. The same could have been said of much of Bengal as well, but the lines of partition were settled in 1947, and should remain so, in my view. Basing sovereignty on religion is a peculiarly Muslim thing to do and would cause intolerable problems for much of India. If the Labour government had been more patient, it might have been possible to have left India within the borders of British Inida, which would have resolved a lot of problems of the subcontinent, including, I think, Afghanistan. Of course, that’s all passé now, but finding Osama living relatively openly in Pakistan will certainly make a significant difference, I should think, to relationships between governments in that part of the world. Leaving the ISI as it is may not be an option.

From what I read, the US pinpointed this location in August….. and planned this operation over the last 8 months. Kudos to the Administration for not rushing something before the midterm elections (unlike some other administration would have done).

@8 : It’s actually Narendra Modi. And however utterly heinous his decisions and actions were in 2002, I really don’t think either Modi or his acolytes have ever espoused a policy based on religiously inspired sovereignty. Indeed, many prominent Hindutva leaders are no believers in any sense of the term. These particular right-wing political groups have developed a blinkered and insidious interpretation of Indian history and statehood based largely on cultural nationalism and xenophobia. Equally despicable. Equally destructive.

Pakistan have been claiming ignorance of OBL’s whereabouts for years. (I, naively, took them seriously.) They insisted that if he was in the country they’d have found him. I agree, of course. The trouble is that that presumes they hadn’t found him in the first place!

It’s always been accepted that the ISI back terrorists. Sometimes this was useful for “the West”, in fact. They were the middle-man between the U.S./Saudis and the mujahideen when it was hoped they were a tool to be wielded against the Russians. Later – like, again, the U.S. and the Saudis – they helped arm and shuttle the most rabid Islamists into Bosnia. Many of them are the fellows we now know as terrorists.

Well, yes, I think it is true that Hindutva was originally a Hindu movement, and probably is still to a large extent. That it does not have unquestioned support in the country is indicated by the fact that Hindu nationalist governments have not survived. As Saikat points out, these right-wing tendencies amongst Hindus are particularly ugly. However, it is not clear that Hinduism as such is nationalistic or sovereignist. Hinduism is largely a Western idea, in which the polymorphous polytheism of India was given a single label — a bit like ‘pagan’ for classical Roman or Greek religion. Besides, there is no Hindu political ideology, to my knowledge, though there is a tradition of Indian political thought. Of course, in India Islam and Hinduism have traditionally been at odds, since Muslim empires have so often ruled a majority Hindu population, so the relationship between religion and independence often had a double signification for Hindus in the days of the Raj. Anti-colonialist sentiment in India is still often anti-Muslim as well. The British Empire, of course, was almost purely mercantile and not religious, and maintained a degree of peace between religions in India, and even though Christianity made claims to special treatment, this was not always accorded to it, missionary endeavours notwithstanding. Islam, however, has never made a distinction between the clerisy (I can never remember the Arabic word for the “conference” of the [religiously] learned) and government, and law has almost always been based on Sharia, which is grounded on relgious principles. There is no sense of (creative) common law in Islam. Many Arab countries seem to have maintained dictatorship precisely in order to maintain a distinction between religion and government, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Iraq in particular, based on the very little I know about the history of the region.

Ophelia, yes they do. But the funny thing is that every time they use the word ‘Hindu’ their conception of it has less to do with the religious beliefs as laid out by Hinduism and more to do with a mangled interpretation of nationalism, the idea itself borrowed from 19th century European political discourse. Not one leader of the Hindutva movement (I’m relying on published interviews and articles here) has even a coherent idea about the actual, overwhemingly diverse religious beliefs or practices of the Hindus or even any sound acquaintance with the historical facts about Hinduism. Not for a moment do I deny that the Hindutva movement has a marked religious dimension to it. But religion alone does not even begin to explain the extent and reach of the movement.